PREPARE BEFORE YOU LEAP

November 2, 2015

The results of effective training are as important to your organization as almost any initiative your company undertakes.

Yet, to be successful, training must be integral.

Do it the right way!

Assume nothing!

Victory comes to those who analyze and plan before they implement.

Thinking ahead while presuming little are the most important traits of a successful trainer.

New equipment, with its technological improvements (and, its unique training challenges), comes into your plant routinely. But, “Ol’ Charlie,” who has been lubricating the rotating equipment in your facility for twenty years, may not know what you assume he knows.

Supervisors may become “blind” to safety hazards that they pass by ten times a day.

Respiratory equipment procedures may rely on “written instructions” even though many of your workers do not read well enough to assimilate that information.

Too often, training expenditures are made as a reaction to some internal operating problem: repeated packing failures; increasing waste; lubrication errors, etc.

Reactive training is not the way to address most training issues. It is often piece-meal and is a “horse is already out of the barn” solution.

The key to successful training is to make it an integral part of your company’s business objectives. Up-front planning helps ensure that your investment in training will deliver measurable results.

Your goal is to make training a cost-effective solution that supports the business objectives of your organization.

It is critical to focus training where it will have the greatest effect on performance. Using needs assessment and task analysis techniques, you can identify the greatest opportunities to improve performance through training.

A training plan must become a solution that can be implemented within the existing structures of your organization.

Whether from broad decisions such as curriculum design or the integration of new learning technology — to details such as staffing, scheduling, and equipping the learning environment, you should strive to transform the training plan into a smoothly functioning reality.

At the heart of it all should be a valid “Skills Assessment Test” — administered to everyone in your workforce. Only then will you be able to determine whether “Ol’ Charlie” really knows the best and safest ways to perform his assigned tasks. And, in addition, you’ll be saving your company money by tailoring your training to only those who need it, rather than continuing with a “one size fits all” approach.

In sum, you need to successfully develop these two necessary strategies before actual training begins:

•Needs Assessment and Task Analysis
•Training Plan and Implementation

You’ll be pleasantly rewarded, many times over, by the positive dividends your front-end investment will deliver.